"Boston was a fine game, sir," he adds. "And that without ever a thought of that town up in Massachusetts."
*****
From a carnival to a graveyard is a far cry indeed, and yet the cemeteries of New Orleans are as distinctive of her as her Mardi Gras festivities. We have spoken of the river and the great part it has played in the history of the city that rests so close to its treacherous shore. And it is that very treacherous shore that makes it so exceedingly difficult to arrange a cemetery in the soft and marshy soil on which the city is built.
So it is that the New Orleans' cemeteries are veritable cities of the dead. For the bodies that are buried within them are placed above the ground, not under them. Tombs and mausoleums are the rule, not the exception, and where a family is not prosperous enough to own even the simplest of tombs, it will probably join with other families or with some association in the ownership of a house in the city of the dead. And for those who have not even this opportunity there are the ovens.
The ovens are built in the great walls that encompass the older cemeteries and make them seem like crumbling fortresses. Four tiers high, each oven large enough to accommodate a coffin—the sealed fronts bear the epitaphs of those who have known the New Orleans of other days. A motley company they are—poets, pirates, judges, planters, soldiers, priests—around them the scarred regiments of those who lived their lives without the haunting touch of Fame upon the shoulder—no one will even venture a guess as to the number that have been laid away within a single one of these cities.
And when you are done with seeing the graves of Jean Lafitte or Dominique You—why is it that the average mind pricks up with a more quickened interest at the tomb of a pirate than at a preacher—the Portuguese sexton begins plucking at the loosely laid bricks of one of these abandoned ovens. Abandoned? He lifts out a skull, this twentieth century Yorick and bids you peep through the aperture. Like the concierge of the old hotel, looking is made more easy from a blazing folding copy of the morning Picayune. In the place are seemingly countless skulls, with lesser bones.
"He had good teeth, this fellow," coughs the Portuguese.
You do not answer. Finally—
"Do they bury all of them this way?"
Not at first, you find. The strict burial laws of New Orleans demand that the body shall be carefully sealed and kept within the oven for at least a year. After that the sexton may open the place, burn the coffin and thrust the bones into the rear of the place. And New Orleans can see nothing unusual in the custom.